GALLIM premiered a new dance film for Northrop based on Miller’s piece, BOAT on November 19, 2020. This film is directed by Andrea Miller and co-directed by Ben Stamper, co-founder of Helix Films. It explores what it looks like, feels like, and means to be searching for home.
In the beginning, three dancers are wrapped around individual television sets while another dancer rushes the camera and kisses the film lens. Then, in the next scene dancers are intertwined as they circle a living room. The rhythm of the feet touching the floor matches the pace of the instrumental. The music is composed by Arvo Pärt and sung by the Twin Cities PopUp Choir, in collaboration with university organist, Dean Billmeyer.
There is a dark theme to the film that wrestles with both celebration and destruction. It increasingly becomes more blurred as the dancers run from one another, often grasping at each other as they move about the space exploring every inch of it until a dancer lands on the ground. Now whether that dancer is on stage, or outdoors in the water is deeply telling. Miller explains how different it is to have a dancer laying on ground at the shoreline of a lifeless beach versus on stage and how the varied mediums affect the viewer.
In the second half of the film, viewers see three television sets on stage once again and then hear the sound of a radio as fans cheer, creating this new emotion. If technology and television existed around Beowulf’s time I'd like to think the TVs represent a method of communication used by Hrothgar (Beowulf) and his warriors to send a message to the village people that said, ‘We defeated the enemy- it’s time for celebration.’ But anyone who knows Beowulf’s tale understands that the celebration is premature. I won’t derail you with plot details but the film does an excellent job of showing the transition even if the film relies heavily on abstraction.
Co-Director Stamper said in a talkback, “In film, we’re used to a horizontal plot line that is cause and effect and it’s what we’re used to when we sit to watch a film in a dark room. One of my biggest fears in life is to wake people up, it’s my least favorite thing to do for whatever reason, and when I was young, my father used to wake me up by slowly pulling the sheet off and he devised all sorts of techniques to wake me up. But that is my job as an artist to turn the lights on.”
In the film, a veil or sheet is raised and lowered above the artists and the rippling effect is similar to when the dancers are outside thrashing in the water. The chanting of the choir’s voices and the wave-like undulation brings momentum and strength to the film. At one point, a dancer in the water is raised by other dancers so that she is standing on their hands. The contrast of the indoor staged setting to the outdoors with the sun’s illumination creates an amazing quality. Stamper credits cinematographer, Andrew Ellis, for the imagery. The bravery and trust involved by the dancers and everyone involved in this film is unfathomable.
Trust is a big component in bringing this film to fruition. Andrea Miller was grateful and had these parting words to say about how involved the dancers were in this project, “How inspiring they (the dancers) were from day one; from taking a home kit COVID test, to our ZOOM rehearsals, to rehearsing in masks, to walking in muddy water. Everything they took on with generosity and with tremendous depth, diving into the work- it reads very clearly in the film, how beautiful these people are." This is Northrop's first dance production since March and Kinetic Light will premiere online Thursday, December 3rd. Tickets at northrup.umn.edu
